This research demonstrates how a European plant common to North America since the sixteenth-century, Cirsium arvense, and commonly considered a weed, became “Canadian” when Early National Americans named it the Canada thistle in the years leading up to the War of 1812. This naming comprised part of a host of actions citizens of the new U.S. republic took to differentiate themselves from their imperial progenitor, and as thus, the Canada thistle might be considered an early origin-point of an American exceptionalist identity.

(under revision, Journal of Social History) Naming Violence in United States Colonialism

Unidentified Santee Women, nd, Newberry Library, Chicago

Naming Violence in United States Colonialism (being revised, the Journal of Social History). This project uncovers the intimate violence of the colonial encounter in the 19th century northern Great Plains by bringing to life the Isáɳti (Dakota) girl named Tipidutawiɳ at the heart of a notorious scandal between a powerful Episcopal missionary priest and his bishop. Certain details of this encounter ended up splashed on the pages of the New York Times in the early 1880s. The church named this girl “Scarlet House,” a name which the paper transmuted into “the Scarlet woman,” a form of linguistic character assassination by which both parties were exonerated from any wrongdoing. By deconstructing the girls name I discovered that while the priest and the Bishop positioned themselves as adversaries, they were also complicit in covering up the darker reality of United States colonialism (currently being revised).

(2010) The Jewish Agrarian Diaspora and Pioneer Nations

One unrecognized aspect of the Diaspora of European Jews in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth-centuries, was the role that farming and agriculture played in integrating these newcomers into their new homes. In my article published in the Western Historical Quarterly in 2010, “Jeffersonian Jews: The Jewish Agrarian Diaspora and the Assimilative Power of the Western Land, 1882-1930,” I demonstrate how Jewish philanthropies enabled European Jews to relocate into rural locations in the western United States and Canada with the aim of proving to non-Jews that Jews could farm and thus were capable of full civic participation and standing. These Jewish agrarians simply desired to farm, but as my article shows, they were also very aware that by living and working on the Western land they possessed a unique right to claim a place in the nation. In a book-length study I will enlarge the scope of this research to include Jewish agrarians in the many locations to which these philanthropies moved Jews: the U.S. and Canada, but also Australia and Argentina. Each one of these nations was undergoing active settlement during this period and utilized settlement programs to place a variety of migratory peoples – not just Jews – into lands they were seeking to dominate.

My historical research and writing seek to re-frame United States history as a colonial history in its own right. I believe that this approach makes sense both because the U.S. emerged from European colonial and imperial endeavors, but also because it helps explain the tensions and struggles the U.S. is experiencing today. Tracing the colonial lineage of United States history reveals the centrality of the encounter between settler colonials, their states, and Indigenous, African, and mestizo women and men of the continent. Borderlands, almost always situated in the heartlands of Indigenous societies, become the spaces for describing and analyzing this colonial encounter. Borderlands theory and method, as well as post-colonial theories of the subaltern, the body, geophysical space, and the archive, are useful tools for getting at these histories. A post-colonial analysis of U.S. history more clearly demonstrates how systems of patriarchy, race ideology, agri-culture, and class distinctiveness have functioned to construct power and privilege, as well as to maintain the status quo. Seeing U.S. history as a colonial history breaks down the mystification of American Exceptionalism with the aim of seeing the history of the U.S. and its people, and the people of North America, in all of their separateness and distinctiveness. It also brings the U.S. into closer dialog with other nations that have emerged out of imperialism and colonialism worldwide.